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DeMint: States Should Reject Medicaid Expansion "Fool's Gold"

Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation and formerly a U.S. senator from South Carolina, described the promise of Obamacare Medicaid expansion funding as “fool’s gold” in an August 26 interview with Media Trackers.

“I hope the people of Ohio will not take what I call fool’s gold; it looks good, it’d make the budget look good the next three to four years – that’s if the federal government comes through with this,” DeMint said of the major component of President Obama’s 2010 health law still being debated in the Ohio General Assembly and several other states.

“I don’t think we can call it compassion to make people dependent on the government, and trap them in dependency,” DeMint explained.

“Putting people on Medicaid has not proved to help people’s health care,” DeMint said. “In fact, the data suggest that people with no insurance at all are as healthy or healthier than those on Medicaid.”

Academic research supports DeMint’s position. For example, a 2010 University of Virginia study found that surgical patients covered by Medicaid were 13 percent more likely to die than those without health insurance.

“Once they’re on Medicaid, it’s very difficult for them to work their way off,” DeMint added. ”We just find it traps people. More and more physicians are closing their practices to Medicare and Medicaid, and I just don’t think it’s compassionate at all.”

Of the taxpayer burden represented by the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, DeMint said, “The way the federal government has incentivized it is to put in a lot of up-front money, but over a ten-year period it will cost Ohio billions of dollars to move people onto Medicaid plans that are already strangling state governments.”

“I would just encourage any state to look at what Medicaid is doing to their current budget and recognize that the promises of more federal money over time are just not gonna come true,” DeMint continued.

“The federal government is broke, it’s printing money, it’s borrowing money, and the likelihood that they’re even gonna come through on the promises they’ve made for Medicaid expansion… they’re not real.”

“The best thing we can do for our country now is to have states be demonstration projects for freedom,” DeMint told Media Trackers.

“The federal government is not gonna provide good health care for our poor,” he concluded. “That’s something we can do a lot better at the state level.”

Personal Freedom and Prosperity 109: Subsidiarity
In 1991, Pope John Paul II wrote in the Centesimus Annus that the Welfare State contradicts the principle of subsidiarity by usurping and relieving society of its responsibility to their neighbors and community. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”

The 16 states with ObamaCare exchanges have each had access to hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government to help establish a successful marketplace. And yet, many are finding themselves struggling with high deficits and low enrollment.

As the Supreme Court mulls over arguments in the King v. Burwell case that could unravel key portions of the president’s signature health care law, the Obama administration has adopted an attitude that is remarkably cavalier.

Arkansas' experiment with Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare is quickly becoming a train wreck for taxpayers. State officials have failed to determine that beneficiaries of the program are still eligible to participate in the government health insurance program, potentially wasting millions of dollars. Knowing how government operates, it is likely that Arkansas is not the only state to fail to do its due diligence.

The Buckeye state is fighting back against the intrusive federal testing mandates that come with Common Core education standards. A House version of the state’s budget contains provisions defunding and blocking the use of PARCC, the set of Common Core aligned assessments that have students in tears all over the country.

It’s been difficult not to notice that a lot of states are having terrible experiences with their ObamaCare exchanges. In fact, a recent Washington Post article reports that “Nearly half of the 17 insurance marketplaces set up by the states and the District under President Obama’s health law are struggling financially.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on King v. Burwell in June. At issue is whether the Affordable Care Act as written only allows for federal subsidies to go to enrollees in states that operate their own exchanges. Right now, 34 states rely on the federal government to operate the exchanges, meaning a significant amount of subsidies are on the line.

By passing a budget through both the House and the Senate, Congress has moved one step closer to sending a repeal of ObamaCare to the White House. The process to get there is still marked by hurdles, but nothing that can’t be overcome. However, for Congress to take the trouble, they’re going to have to hear from you all the way through the process, lest they choose the path of least resistance – that of doing nothing.

ObamaCare was supposed to reduce the cost of insurance, hence the Affordable Care Act. But is this really what it did? States with less regulations before the law was enacted had more affordable health care costs. Take, for example, North Carolina and Nevada. They saw individual premiums for people in their twenties rise over 150 percent after the law was enacted.

Whew, it’s been a tough week. Looking back on the last five years and all the harm ObamaCare has done to this country is a real downer. In order to head into the weekend on a slightly lighter note, let’s conclude our series with a little frivolity, the five best quotes about ObamaCare.